THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE - “These figures do not attempt to allege that foreign
nationals in the country illegally commit more
crimes than other groups,” the report states. “It
simply identifies thousands of crimes that should
not have occurred and thousands of victims that
should not have been victimized because the
perpetrator should not be here.”
CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Justice ends funding to 'sanctuary cities' in huge House GOP victory:The surge of illegal juveniles crossing into the United States from Mexico hit 38,566 by the beginning of June, a 69 percent increase over last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In revealing the numbers, Alabama Sens. Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby said that since the end of 2013, 147,077 younger illegals have been apprehended, yet only a small fraction have been removed from the United States.
The duo provided the numbers in a letter to Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch objecting to federal plans to house many of the newly arrived at a naval air station in the state.
Transporting some of these juveniles more than 900 miles away from our southern border to the State of Alabama, instead of expeditiously and humanely sending them back to their homes, will only make the situation worse. It rewards illegal conduct, and arguably renders the United States complicit in criminal conspiracies to violate our immigration laws, they wrote.

Sessions: 91% of illegal youths handed over to illegal relatives: The surge of illegal juveniles crossing into the United States from Mexico hit 38,566 by the beginning of June, a 69 percent increase over last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
In revealing the numbers, Alabama Sens. Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby said that since the end of 2013, 147,077 younger illegals have been apprehended, yet only a small fraction have been removed from the United States.
The duo provided the numbers in a letter to Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch objecting to federal plans to house many of the newly arrived at a naval air station in the state.
Transporting some of these juveniles more than 900 miles away from our southern border to the State of Alabama, instead of expeditiously and humanely sending them back to their homes, will only make the situation worse. It rewards illegal conduct, and arguably renders the United States complicit in criminal conspiracies to violate our immigration laws, they wrote.

By Tom Hall 7 July 2016

Tuesday’s execution-style murder of 37-year-old Alton Sterling by police in Baton Rouge, the capital and second-largest city in Louisiana, is the latest in a long series of brutal killings by police in the United States.

Sterling was the 595th person killed by police since the start of the year, according to the web site Killed by Police (two killings were recorded by the site later in the same day, bringing the total to 597). It was the third killing this year in Baton Rouge alone, a smaller city with a population of only 230,000, already matching last year’s total. Nationwide, there have been more police killings through July 7 than there were at the same time last year, when the total number reached 1,208.

The killing of Sterling, who was African American, touched off a wave of protests and became a major story in the national press. However, had Sterling’s death not been captured on video by bystanders, as is the case with the vast majority of police killings, it would almost certainly have been swept under the rug, with the lying police version of events accepted without question.

Sterling was a father of five who had been living in a homeless shelter for the past several months. He lived day-to-day off of money from selling CDs outside of a local convenience store in a poor, working class area of the city. He was a regular fixture at the location. Residents who spoke to the press remembered Sterling as a friendly and helpful person who regularly gave away CDs and money for food in spite of his own poverty.

Sterling was at his usual spot shortly after midnight on July 5 when he was approached by two Baton Rouge police officers, since identified as Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II, both of whom are white. They were allegedly responding to a 911 call stating that Sterling had threatened someone with a gun. While Sterling did own and was apparently carrying a gun, which is legal in Louisiana, store owner Abdullah Muflahi disputed this allegation, telling CNN that he did not hear Sterling get in an altercation with anybody. “Just five minutes before, he walked into the store getting something to drink, joking around, [and we were] calling each other names,” Muflahi said.

What happened next was captured on cell phone video by eyewitnesses in a nearby parked car. (A second video was released yesterday.) The officers shot Sterling with a taser and wrestled him violently to the ground. Then, while he was pinned to the ground by the two officers, one of them shouted, “He’s got a gun!,” prompting them to pump several rounds into Sterling from point blank range while he lay in a prone and subdued position on the pavement.

Muflahi, who witnessed the killing, denied police claims that Sterling was reaching for his gun when he was shot, and that he “was not holding his gun or touching his pockets during the incident,” according to the Advocate. This statement is confirmed by the video footage.

Protests began at the scene soon afterward and are ongoing. The crowd swelled to several hundred as the protests continued throughout Tuesday and into early Wednesday morning, and demonstrators briefly succeeded in stopping traffic at the adjacent intersection. The folding table from which Sterling sold his CDs was turned into a makeshift memorial, where people wrote their condolences and left mementos behind.

Sterling’s family held an emotional press conference Wednesday morning in front of City Hall, calling for the arrest of the officers and for other eyewitnesses to step forward. “I for one will not rest and will not allow you all to sweep him in the dirt, until the adequate punishment is served to all parties involved,” said Quinyetta McMillon, the mother of Sterling’s oldest child, Cameron Sterling, choking back tears.

The official response to the killing of Sterling has followed a familiar and time-tested routine. Behind a screen of hand-wringing and declarations that they will get to the bottom of the incident, the political establishment is preparing to whitewash the killing and defend the powers of the police.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and the Baton Rouge police held separate press conferences on Wednesday morning following that of the family’s, feigning sympathy for Sterling’s relatives and promising a “thorough” and “impartial” investigation, which Edwards announced would be conducted by the federal Justice Department.

The involvement of the Justice Department, which cleared Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in its “independent” civil rights investigation of the killing of Michael Brown, is the surest sign that a cover-up of the crime is being prepared. Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden told reporters that he had already received calls of “support” from president Barack Obama and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

According to lawyers for Sterling’s family, police immediately confiscated the recordings of the killing made by the store’s security cameras. “If not for [smart phone manufacturers], maybe we wouldn’t be here today right now,” attorney and state representative Edmond Jordan said at Wednesday’s press conference. Body-camera footage, which was touted after the Michael Brown murder as a cure-all solution to police brutality, is apparently not available, as is frequently the case in instances of police brutality. Police claim improbably that the body cameras “fell off” of the officers while they jumped Sterling.

While police have not yet been deployed against protesters, Edwards repeatedly warned them during his press conference that “it’s urgent that they remain peaceful.” This is a coded threat that if the protests escape the control of the political establishment and the Democratic Party, they will be met with riot police and the National Guard as happened in Ferguson and Baltimore, where military-style occupations were justified on the basis of isolated or unsubstantiated claims of “violence.”

Sections of the Democratic Party, “civil rights” leaders and practitioners of identity politics have been deployed in an attempt to head off the protests. At the Sterling family’s press conference, Baton Rouge NAACP Leader Michael McClanahan declared Sterling’s murder the result of “1 percent of bad police officers” and called on Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie Jr to resign. The NAACP has also called for the hiring of more black police officers.

Congressman Cedric Richmond, a black Democrat whose district covers parts of Baton Rouge, called on the Justice Department to investigate the killing yesterday, before it was announced by Edwards.

Whatever role racism may play in particular acts of police violence, the explosive growth of police killings is a class, not a racial question. It is the consequence of a deliberate policy of bolstering the repressive powers of local police departments. American police forces have been virtually transformed into paramilitary groups that view the population as a hostile force, armed to the teeth with hi-tech weaponry, including billions of dollars worth of military hardware loaned to them for free by the Pentagon.

Baton Rouge has a poverty rate of 25 percent, ten points above the already-high national average. A mere 80 miles to the southeast, in the major port city of New Orleans, the ruling elite seized upon Hurricane Katrina, a natural disaster compounded by decades of neglect, by remaking the city in the interests of the rich, most notably by converting almost the entire public school system into privately-run charter schools. The New Orleans Police Department gained international infamy for numerous atrocities its officers committed during Hurricane Katrina.

Sterling’s death follows a a long chain of high-profile police killings, including of Eric Garner in Staten Island on July 17, 2014; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014; 12 year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio on November 22, 2014; Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina on April 4, 2015; and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland on April 19, 2015.

The Obama administration responded to these high-profile police killings by backing the repression of protests while pledging police “reform.” While the reign of police violence continues, the issue had largely been dropped by the corporate-controlled media. It has also not been made an issue in the presidential election campaign. President Obama, in a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, reiterated his complacent statement that “America is really great [right now].” The killing of Alton Sterling, which occurred only hours before, exposes the brutal reality of class relations in the United States.

The police killings in Louisiana and Minnesota: The class issues

8 July 2016

Millions of people around the world have reacted with shock, outrage and revulsion at the latest videos and images of police murder in the United States. Thousands of people took part in demonstrations throughout the US Thursday, with more scheduled today.

The final horrific moments of Alton Sterling, 37, and Philando Castile, 32, have been watched and shared millions of times on Facebook and other social media. On July 5, Sterling was shot by police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana at least three times at point-blank range as he was pinned down to the ground. The next day, Castile was shot at least four times during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend and child watched helplessly. Both Sterling and Castile were African American.

Less publicized in the media were two other killings that underscore the pervasiveness of police violence in America, and the fact that it is not only African Americans who are targeted. On Thursday, a cell phone video was published by the Fresno Bee showing the police killing of 19-year-old Dylan Noble in Fresno, California on June 25. Noble, who was white and unarmed, can be seen lying on the ground motionless as police fire multiple bullets downward into his motionless body. This past weekend, police in Fullerton, California shot and killed 19-year-old Pedro Erik Villanueva, a Hispanic youth who was also unarmed, after a car chase.

The killing of Sterling and Castile, like almost

all of the other 600 police killings that have

taken place so far this year, and the thousands

since the Obama administration took office,

would have been “swe[pt] in the dirt” (to use

the phrase of Quinyetta McMillon, the

mother of one of Mr. Sterling’s children) had they not been recorded by bystanders on cell phone cameras.

It is now nearly two years since the killing of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 sparked nationwide protests against police violence. However, despite the pledges of “reform” and cynical professions of concern from the political establishment when one or another killing sparks protests, the reign of violence continues unabated. Indeed, the number of killings so far this year exceeds the number of Americans killed up to this point in 2015.

The same ruling class that is waging a relentless war on the working class is engaged in unspeakable violence all over the world. Domestic and foreign policy are not separated by an iron wall. The methods used abroad are increasingly being deployed to deal with the social crisis at home. Within the overall apparatus of state repression, the police, armed to the teeth with the most modern weaponry, play a central role.

Police violence is essentially a class question. Understanding that opposition to police violence threatens to become the catalyst for a broader mobilization of the working class, politicians and the media have rushed to present the killing of Sterling and Castile as motivated exclusively by racism.

Racism no doubt plays a role in many police killings.

However, the claim that police violence can be solely

explained in racial terms is self-contradictory and untenable.

While African Americans are disproportionately victimized

by of police violence, half of those killed by police are white,

according to an analysis by the Washington Post. In many

cases, such as in the killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, the

officers themselves are black or Hispanic. In some cities with

the worst police violence, such as Baltimore and

Philadelphia, a majority of police officers are minorities, and are headed by black police chiefs, black city council members and black mayors.

Perhaps most significantly, the unending stream of police murders has taken place under the presidency of Barack Obama, an African American. The Obama administration has used federal investigations to whitewash police killings, has sided with the police in every use-of-force case brought before the Supreme Court and continues to oversee the transfer of military weaponry to local police forces throughout the country.

The Obama White House presided over the deployment of militarized police and National Guard to crack down on demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and Baltimore, Maryland last year following the killings of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray.

Speaking in Warsaw, Poland on Thursday, Obama defended the police while seeking to present the killings in racial terms. He pointed to “biases across the criminal justice system” that make it so, “black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents.” He added, “If communities are mistrustful of the police, it makes the officers—who are doing a great job—that’s making their jobs harder.”

Obama’s statements came the same day that the New York Times, which has in recent weeks stepped up its campaign to bury the issues of social inequality in the United States, ran a column entitled “Alton Sterling and When Black Lives Stop Mattering,” presenting the killings as the result of a “world where too many people have their fingers on the triggers of guns aimed directly at black people.”

Another column, posted on the Times’ web site Thursday night, insisted that “white America” will “never understand” the experience of “a nation of nearly 40 million black souls inside a nation of more than 320 million people.”

Such statements are aimed at undermining the instinctive feelings of solidarity felt by workers of all races to the events of this past week, while at the same time channeling opposition along channels that pose no threat to the ruling class and the economic system that it defends.

The United States is on the verge of major social and political convulsions. Over the past year, the growing political radicalization of workers and young people has found reflection in the support for Bernie Sanders, who presented himself as a socialist and focused his campaign on questions of social inequality and the power of the “billionaire class.” As Sanders moves to endorse Clinton and seek to convince his supporters to back the candidate of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus, the media and Democratic Party are seeking to change the subject: from social inequality to race and identity politics.

The speed with which the media and political establishment have sought to present police killings as merely a matter of race reflects the fear that widespread opposition to police violence might be linked up with the growing social and political radicalization of the working class.

But this is precisely what is required. The fight against police violence, like the defense of all democratic rights, can only be taken forward on the basis of a struggle to unify the working class of all races and ethnicities in a common struggle against the capitalist system.